In light of this being the 50th-anniversary year of Twyla Tharp’s choreographic life, we asked Sara Rudner, who was deeply involved in Tharp’s early dancing-making, to come to NYU Tisch Dance (where I am an adjunct) to talk about working with her. Rudner, who is now the director of dance at Sarah Lawrence College, imbued her dancing with light and depth and helped create the Tharp style. Rudner’s talk, which focused on Tharp’s work but also touched on her own choreography, took place in one of the NYU Tisch Dance studios on September 25, 2015. Luckily, one of our sharp grad students, Donald Shorter, turned on the voice memo of his cell phone and recorded the event. I transcribed his recording and edited the interview slightly, then got Sara’s input to clarify some sections. To learn more, go to the Tharp website. 

Wendy: How did you first start working with Twyla?

Sara: My friend Margy Jenkins  was working with her. We were neighbors on Broome Street. Twyla was doing a show and she needed another dancer, and Margy said, “I know someone.” And Twyla wanted to see who I was before she didn’t pay me—before she didn’t pay me. [laughter] No one was paying anybody, there was no money, but I did receive $50 for the first performance of Re-Moves.

Wendy: The NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] didn’t start till later in the 60s.

Sara: There was no New York State Council on the Arts. Anyway, so Margy took Twyla to see a performance I was doing at Judson Hall. Barbara Gardner had done a piece and someone got injured and I stepped in and I learned the piece. Margy said that Twyla came in [to see me dance] and stayed for a few minutes and said, “She’ll do.” [laughter] That was the beginning.

Wendy: And boy did she do! Sara defined Twyla’s work for 20 years.

Sara: We came from very different backgrounds—I was a New York City kid, born and raised in Brooklyn. I had no art training. I ran around and swam.

Wendy: And you didn’t do ballet training.

Sara: I had a little bit of baby ballet. I knew what that was, and then nothing. But our energy was very similar. So one of the first times we met [in the studio], I saw her rubbing her hands, saying Ah, you’ve got a lot of energy.

Wendy: She was probably thinking, Ooh what I can do with this girl!

Sara: I was really almost a blank slate. The first time Margy told me that she was studying with Merce Cunningham, I said, “Who’s she?” I had no idea. I had a degree in Russian studies from Barnard College, I was 20 years old and I knew nothing. So it was a perfect opportunity because I was a blank slate and had a lot of energy. I’d been a swimmer and a runner, so I was strong and well coordinated.

Wendy: That’s so interesting because now, one of the people she likes is John Selya, who was a surfer. Twyla always liked someone who looks like a person onstage rather than a dancer with this kind of I’m-dancing-for-the-balcony-seats projection. And you were definitely that person.

Sara: In the beginning experimentations she chose to work with Margy Jenkins, who’s a statuesque woman, and then with me and then with herself. So she was not into the cookie-cutter thing, she was experimenting with the kinds of people. When I say experiment, I mean she experimented like crazy. We did all sorts of things that most people if they look at them now they would say, That’s not dance. The first thing I ever did with Twyla was with a stopwatch; it was at Judson Church. My part was [gets up and walks a straight line, the long side of a rectangle]. Then I got to a corner and I returned to where I began to give the stopwatch to Margy, maybe Twyla, and she walked the diagonal; and Twyla, or maybe Margy, walked the short side of the rectangle.

Wendy: Was that Re-Moves?

Sara: Yes, Re-Moves, 1966, was task-based. Twyla was looking at stuff from the bottom up. She had done all this dancing; she had done a lot of ballet. There are pictures of her in a tutu, wearing a tiara.

Wendy: Do you think she was influenced by the other stuff going on at Judson? Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs were also very task-based.

Sara: Yes, task based. She was also very influenced by the minimalist painters.

Wendy: Of which her husband, Robert Huot, was one.

Sara: Yes. Those early pieces had props, objects, were spatially very structural. They were circles, squares, oblongs. They [minimalist painters, sculptors and dancers] were all hanging out together. Twyla was in that group of people who went to Max’s Kansas City and drank a lot and ate ice cream. That’s what I remember about Max’s Kansas City is the ice cream sundaes Sundays. But eventually—Twyla’s a dancer. She loved movement; she loved complicated things, she loved a great physical challenge. And the physical challenges in those early pieces were really intense. In the same piece, Re-Moves, there’s a balcony at Judson and she hung a ladder, a rope ladder down, and I climbed down the rope ladder backwards. I was wearing black leotard and tights—we all were—and a white felt hat.
Wendy: Yeah, you looked like nuns in the photos.

Sara: The hat was a triangle, and the tip was in the middle of the forehead.

Wendy: And Robert Huot probably designed it.

Sara: He designed it, yeah. The thing she asked me to do was to walk backwards on relevé after coming off the ladder and make zig-zag patterns. So if the ladder was there, the pattern was [demonstrates in the space] zig-zag zig-zag all the way down till I ended on the floor. The entire time I had to slowly lower my arms and head, flex my spine, bend my knees until I was lying supine on the floor. It took about 10 minutes.

Wendy: Were there other people doing other things, or that was it?

Sara: I was supposed to give a cue in performance but I went so slowly that the cue I was supposed to give was late. Technically I was not so great, and the task took a lot of control and concentration. It might have been easier if I had gone faster.

Wendy: Most of these pieces were in silence, right? Was there music?

Sara: No but she would choreograph to music. We would dance to Beethoven, Mozart. We didn’t perform to music until Three Page Sonata for Four (1967), with music by Charles Ives. She was extremely musical, even to the point of translating musical scores to lines. She would set up a straight line, I followed the rhythm of one musical line, she the other. We would take the rhythms and go back and forth on the lines. Something like that [demonstrating]. It never looked like music; it was just us translating those musical phrases.

Wendy: In her later work, one of the things she’s known for is her range of music—classical, rock, jazz.

Sara: Wide ranging, big appetite for dance art. Huge. Huge energy; questioning all the time. Very intense intellect. She brought extreme passion into our work together. She was also a monster mover. This woman …she was unbelievable,…watching her dance was really extraordinary.

Wendy: My eye always went to Sara, because Sara, in addition to being an incredible mover, has a kind of sweetness. [To Sara:] Your whole body was in every movement. Whereas Twyla gave off a different energy like, “I’m getting through this.” It was more belligerent.

Sara: She was fierce. She was hyper-mobile in her joints. She had strong muscles so could keep all that together and she had great power and reach. She also had a personality. What happened was, because we had a range of personalities and physicalities, it gave the work a more everyday look, less like a corps de ballet.

Wendy: Rose Marie Wright was six feet tall. She told me in one interview, “When I was dancing in Pennsylvania Ballet, they didn’t know what to do with me. They just couldn’t cast me in anything.”

Sara: In toe shoes, she’s like 6 foot 3 inches.

Wendy: And she said, “When I got to Twyla, Twyla knew what to do with me.” And Twyla put her to work. It was the three of them: Twyla, Sara and Rose were like the three goddesses for years.

Sara: We did a lot of work together, a lot of hours. What I learned from Twyla besides the amazing experiences she gave me, was how to work, how to be in a studio and just focus on what I was doing. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Oh, maybe we should do it again. One more time—17 more times later—one more time. Let’s do it one more time.

Wendy: Because the work was so intricate.

Sara: It was very intricate, and to put that into your muscle memory so that you could then be fairly accurate. There were pieces I never did correctly. I never did it the way it was written. We were a team so we could pick up and be where we needed to be.

Wendy: But she also wanted a little freedom in there, didn’t she?

Sara: Not in The Fugue.

Wendy: How much movement did you contribute?  The Fugue (1970) had certain variations; did you make your own variations?

Sara: No, that was a set piece. The time we started doing things individually was in Medley which was created before The Fugue. Medley was danced outdoors in 1969 on the great lawn and at American Dance Festival when it was in New London, CT, and this was a real experiment for her. We were all working down in Kermit Love’s studio on Great Jones Street. There was a studio and she’d take us in one by one and she would do something, and the others didn’t know what she was doing in there. She would say, Don’t tell the others what we did. She had made some phrases and then she just did them and said, What do you remember? So we each came up with something different. She started working more improvisationally with us. She also worked with each of us separately in different ways. She wrote down words that were prompts, and then she’d string whatever we did together. That’s the first piece she didn’t dance in. So that piece led me to be an individual dancer.

 

Wendy: How were you earning a living? You were spending hours and hours in the studio with Twyla, not getting paid very much. What else were you doing?

Sara: I worked for a slumlord in his office. In 1965–66, I worked for the Free Southern Theater. It was an integrated group of actors who went down south and blew everybody’s mind. And then I started working for Merce Cunningham, in Merce’s office at Brooklyn Academy of Music. I did clerical work; I typed. (I learned typing in my high school.) Rose babysat. Theresa Dickinson did administrative work for arts organizations and proofreading for science textbooks. Margery Tupling had her own source of money. I could work for half a day; I could leave work at noon and take a class, then go to rehearsal.

Wendy: When did you start choreographing yourself?

Sara: The first thing I did was the program with Douglas [Dunn] in 1971 at Laura Dean’s place. I started with Twyla 65-66 and then I stayed with her until ’74. In the early ’70s I started working with you guys [Wendy Rogers, Risa Jaroslow and Wendy Perron] and I started doing other things on my own. Twyla was amazing because she insisted at some point that the dancers she was working with get paid 52 weeks a year. We didn’t have a lot of money. Part of my curiosity about being in dance was Let’s take responsibility for your artistic ideas: Rehearsals, going on tour, the bus, the airplane, whatever. I wanted to learn more about the business of making dances, putting them on, working with dancers. So in 1974 I said I think I need to do other things,, and she said, Are you gonna have a baby? [laughter] What could you possibly wanna do…and she was right in many ways. (I did have a baby many years later.) But I was hanging out with other dancers, and people were talking about what they were doing. I was 30 years old and I was thinking, Yah maybe I should find out about other things. So I went off and made a couple solos, and danced with Wendy P. and Risa and Wendy Rogers, we did marathon dances. Five hours at St. Mark’s Church.

Wendy: You had a whole philosophy about that, so talk about that.

Sara: As far as I was concerned, dancing happened whether someone watched you or not. Dancing was always going on. So the idea behind this was, we were dancers and this is what dancers do – dance. I had initially asked for seven hours, but Barbara Dilley [director of Danspace at the time] and the people at Danspace, said six, five maybe. So we bargained. But the idea was, we’re just gonna keep on dancing. You [the audience] can come and go whenever you want. We started at 5:00 pm and we ended at 10 pm. We worked our way up methodically. We created all this basic material that we all danced together, the phrases we made together then we set up improvisations.  “Brain Damage,” one of the sections, was the hardest concept to realize.

Wendy: I can’t forget “Brain Damage.”

Sara: “Brain Damage” was one pattern in the arms and another pattern in the legs, it was like a five against a seven, so nothing fit together.

Wendy: And there was running in circles, and slightly different versions of it, which I extricated myself from because I didn’t have the stamina to run. [This clip from “Running” section, as performed in 1975 at Oberlin (without Sara), is mostly with Wendy Rogers and Risa Jaroslow.]

Sara: We were running around, and did some improvisation, we didn’t have music.

Wendy: Didn’t we have a fan making noise?

Sara: Yes, we had a backdrop, which was painted with floral designs by visual artist Robert Kushner; it was hung across the altar at St. Mark’s. At that point, St. Marks’ Church had fixed pews, a big wooden cross, and a red linoleum floor. Bob hung curtains in panels, and he had fans that blew these panels. When we weren’t dancing we were hiding behind the panels.

Wendy: There were just four of us.

Sara: Just four of us for five hours. It was intense. And my mother asked why we didn’t shave under our arms. [laughter] We were making a statement. “It’s not nice,” she said. But she came and watched. And people did come and go.

Wendy: Carolyn Brown stayed the whole five hours, and so did Kenneth King. The whole thing was to have dance be a continuum [to the students] not like a thing that had a beginning, middle, and end. You guys read the Merce Cunningham essay “The Impermanent Art.” Very much along those lines: Dancing is as impermanent as breathing.

Sara: It’s just what we do. [to the students] I know you guys have the same experience. You come here in the morning and you work all day. So we just put it all together. I couldn’t get to do that kind of thing with Twyla because her aesthetic was really to be in theaters and make those pieces and that’s what she wanted to do.

Wendy: And she changed more towards the theatrical. The things you were describing with the stopwatch, in the beginning…

Sara: That was open spaces. That was very simple. And then we had our hair done, and put on beautiful costumes.

Wendy: The haircutting was a big deal. In 1972 all dancers, whether ballet or modern, had their hair in a bun. And all of a sudden, Twyla and her two main dancers had their hair cut at Sassoon and they were stylish-looking. And then everyone went, Why do we have to have our hair in a bun? For women in downtown New York, it was a landmark influence; we started wearing our hair in more the way we might want to rather than like ballet girls. Onstage it made it even more that thing of They’re people rather than “dancers.” It made the performers closer to the audience somehow.

Sara: They could identify more. Especially during the ’70s, in hippie land, and feminist land. And we all were different. Twyla had a blunt bowl cut. Rose had longer hair, shaped, and my hair was layered into curls.

Wendy: And this was during the feminist time, and it had to do with what Twyla was doing onstage because her women were very athletic, they could do a lot physically. The first company was just women, and they were so strong and they didn’t have to relate to a man. It’s the way Martha Graham’s company started too: it was all women at first.

Sara: And then things progressed. Wendy and I were talking about the dichotomies of Twyla’s work: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. There were these very methodical pieces, and then there was a piece called Jam. Jam was premiered at Barnard College in 1967 and we were just throwing fits. We wore thick plastic costumes, full body suits and if you just blew on them, they made a horrible noise. You know those lights when you’re driving and you need flashers because your car is breaking down? One side is a spotlight and the other side is the flasher. So these spotlights were in our faces and we were in these noisy costumes. We had these fits and we would shake. Twyla choreographed it to James Brown. We would stop while Margy was doing something very serene. It was really pretty wild.

Wendy: But that sounds like Deuce Coupe. She had the ballet person being serene and then all you guys were doing crazy stuff. [To the students] Deuce Coupe was in 1973, and it’s when she brought her own dancers to the Joffrey’s ballet dancers. The music was the Beach Boys, so that was already a kind of sacrilege. In the first version, what she had for a set was about five kids who were already doing graffiti on subways. There was a scroll upstage, and they would come in spraying the graffiti, and the scroll would go up and they’d spray graffiti on the new stretch of paper. So she had two kinds of dancers, Beach Boys music, and the graffiti kids, and the whole thing made a statement of smashing high art and popular art together.

Sara: And this tour [Tharp’s 50th-anniversary tour] is Bach and Yowzie.

Wendy: Apollonian and Dionysian, two different halves.

Sara: She started that with Bad Smells and Sinatra Songs (both 1982). Bad Smells was everybody wearing rags. It was an intense dance. That was the first time she used a big screen. SONY had this big screen and Tom Rawe was filming it while it was going on. No one was using video that way. She was pushing the envelope early and hard.

Wendy: That takes a lot of courage. Where do you think she got that courage from, or how did that manifest in your work with her?

Sara: When we got in the studio we just worked. Twyla never came in and started talking about “It was a horrible review, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m feeling lousy today.” Nothing like that. If you read her book, Push Comes to Shove, she had an early childhood full of schedules. Wake up. 6:30: Work on my English composition. 6:45: Practice my viola. All through the day. In her family, she was the first child; she was the genius child. She did it with hard hard work. As hard as we thought we worked, she worked twice as hard. I can remember being on our first tour in 1967. We were in Germany and we were dancing on some crap floor, and she cut her foot and I went up to her and said, “Twyla your foot,” and she said [loud, stern voice], “Go back to the dance!” It was just another world for me, being in the presence of that kind of energy and ambition and determination. Thank god she had the brilliance to carry this on. In seven years she made 35 pieces.

Wendy: When I met you, you had that same kind of determination in work, and that was a new world for me. The focus: just keep working working working.

Sara: That’s what we do. Things do shift as you get older. I would hear her coaching dancers, going back to Deuce Coupe, I would hear her saying things to them that she never said to us.

Wendy: Probably because you just did them intuitively.

Sara: And she also then thought about her work. Sometimes you make something and don’t know what you’re doing until you perform it, and finally you start understanding what was coming out, what that intuition was.

Wendy: I remember one thing she said, when I was in one of her “farm clubs,” which is when she had a bunch of people working, when we were doing almost like a tendu, and she said, “You must feel personally about every move.” I understood that because I already felt that and I loved hearing that from her. It’s a really simple statement but instead of saying “You must do it correctly,” she said, “You must feel personally about it.” I think that’s a key to how she brought personalities out.

Sara: Twyla was extremely generous in the studio, fun and intense to work with, so you wanted to meet the challenges. And she did it herself; it wasn’t like she was sitting back. It was great because you didn’t have eyes on you so you could do what you had to do. You weren’t being scrutinized by a master. She is fun to work with. She’d say, “What can you do?” and she’d laugh and giggle. She takes what the dancers can do and pushes them to do more. I think that’s why people love working with her. After I took time off—for three years I went out and had a company and did all kinds of things—I went back, which was a real gift to me because I had an injury, a detached retina. At that time in the early 80s when you have a detached retina, they didn’t do laser surgeries yet. You were in bed on your back for weeks on end. I had a lot of time to think, to think about who I was: I was about 37. What do I want to do now? I’ve had a company, I’ve done this touring thing. Managers wanted me to do things I don’t want to do. They would never let me do big open pieces.

Wendy: They’re gonna force you to be on a stage!

Sara: Yeah, to be on a stage, with three pieces on a program, and this and that. So I went back. As a dancer I could appreciate all the work that went into creating the choreography, creating the touring schedule, the company structure. It was like, “Oh, you’re gonna do all that for me and I can dance?!?! Fabulous!” So I truly appreciate how hard it is to make those structures and make them work.

Wendy: What pieces was she making then?

Sara: Baker’s Dozen (1979). She made Catherine Wheel (1981) during that time; she made Sinatra Songs. She made Bad Smells.

Wendy: [to the class] If you see the video of The Catherine Wheel and the “Golden Section,” Sara is really the goddess in it. You just can’t imagine anyone moving more beautifully.

Sara: Well that whole section of the dance was about transcendence/heaven. Like In the Upper Room (1986), it was the aspirational, heavenly place as opposed to the hell that was the main body of that dance. Saint Catherine was martyred at the wheel, the human family was fighting with each other, the father fucking the cat; it was horrible stuff. She meant it to be hell, malicious. Then came “The Golden Section.” It was all early David Byrne, the Talking Heads. He made the score for this piece.

¶¶¶ Questions from the students were not recorded. ¶¶¶

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 person likes this December 1, 2015 Wendy PerronFeatured Uncategorized 4

Could everybody please calm down about naming your company or your choreography? Sure, it’s fun to play around with the punctuation marks on your keyboard. But invented punctuation doesn’t guarantee inventive choreography. It’s just punctuation run amok.

For some people, the regular flow of upper and lower-case font doesn’t project the CONFIDENCE they feel about their enterprise. The solution? All CAPS. We’ve seen it in Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and MOMIX. Now we’re seeing it in MYOKYO, iMEE, and T(H)RASH, not to mention FULL.STILL.HUNGRY.

Which gets us into another area of Punc Amok: dots gone wild. In the old days, you knew you reached the end of a sentence when you saw a period. Now these dots are scattered willy nilly. Observe Chu. This. , piece.piece, and Kara•Mi.

Back to the wayward CAPITAL letters. It seems some people are using them as a design element. See the San Jose–based company sjDANCEco, the all-woman company ChEckiT!Dance; Lauri Stallings’ group in Atlanta, gloATL; and possibly the most perfectly patterned use of CAPS,

bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, a 2005 piece by Marie Chouinard (or should I say, mARIE cHOUINARD)

 

Then there’s the opposite: those who insist they are too modest to use capital letters at all. Thus we have NYC choreographer luciana achugar, whose name is spelled “correctly” by presenters like New York Live Arts and Danspace but not by publications like The New York Times or Time Out New York that have to stick to style codes.

Some are pushing the envelope of those two vertical dots that are intended to introduce a particular example. I have to list these vertically or else it will upset my colon.

:pushing progress, a company/a workshop

MOVE: the company, in Vancouver

Lang: Music + Lang: Dance., a piece by Jessica Lang

Then there’s the breakthrough discovery of the double colon by Chafin Seymour for his seymour::dancecollective.

One company that’s had to eat its words, or non-words, is Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal. They thought it would be cool to abbreviate their name and put it in brackets. But apparently nobody recognized [bjm] as a dance company so they had to change the name back again.

The latest zinger is the title ‘Rōdē,ō: Four Dance Episodes, Justin Peck’s premiere for NYCB last season. It sends writers and editors scurrying to find obscure marks on a keyboard or on the internet. Of course one could refer to the ballet like so: “Rodeo, with long marks on all the vowels, a single quote mark before the R, a comma after the E, and a colon after the O.” By that time, no reader would want to see this ballet, which is actually quite fabulous.

Deborah Jowitt called Peck’s title “diacritically enriched.” So…to feed my ongoing Punc Amok obsession, what’s YOUR favorite diacritically enriched title?

 

 

2 people like this August 31, 2015 Wendy PerronFeatured Uncategorized 8

Did I read that right? The New York Times’ chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, talking about the decade when Balanchine, Tudor and Ashton died, wrote “Dance was dead.” I re-read those three words that appeared in the new online preview called “Dance This Week,” hoping I had mis-read it.

Actually, dance was bursting with life in the ’80s. Performances were bristling with creativity, guts, challenge, inventiveness, and passion. That decade gave us three enduring classics of postmodernism: Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983); Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room (1986); and Bill T. Jones’ D-Man in the Waters (1989). These are momentous works that yield revelations every time we see them, but they came from scrappy environments—the loft spaces, gymnasiums, and churches of downtown Manhattan.

At New York CIty Ballet, Jerome Robbins made the wondrous Glass Pieces in 1983 plus a bunch of other ballets that are still in the rep. He took a collection of his Broadway numbers and created Jerome Robbins Broadway, which won a Tony for best musical.

The Joffrey Ballet was mounting works from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Their revival of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring by way of Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer was earthshattering; it triggered much debate.

It was the decade when William Forsythe blossomed in Germany, essentially redefining ballet and spawning scores of young choreographers.

In 1982 Cora Cahan and Eliot Feld established The Joyce Theater, which has presented a different dance company almost every week since then. Brooklyn Academy of Music started its Next Wave Festival, bringing in Pina Bausch regularly since 1984, filling the house with audiences from all walks of life.

The ’80s was when African American dance artists realized they could extend beyond the Ailey mold. People like Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Garth Fagan, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Bebe Miller created searing and/or subtle works that sometimes delved into cultural identity.

Other choreographers who emerged in the ’80s were Stephen Petronio, Ohad Naharin, Mark Dendy, Elizabeth Streb, Pat Graney, and Dancenoise. Dancenoise! Their recent reunion show at the Whitney Museum was so brilliantly uproarious that it could make anyone pine for the ’80s. It was a great decade for feisty women choreographers.

Merce Cunningham began experimenting with video in works like Channels/Inserts and Points in Space while continuing to make remarkable works for the stage. (I loved Pictures and Fabrications.)

Cunningham and Trisha Brown toured Europe, stimulating a vibrant scene in several countries. In England Richard Alston and badboy Michael Clark ignited a whole scene; in France Philippe Deconflé and Maguy Marin and many more were blasting forth with their own style of dance-making.

Dance was everywhere. Site-specific performances brought dance to people in parks, on bridges and at Grand Central Station via dance artists like Stephan Koplowitz and Joanna Haigood.

Sure, a lot of great ballet dancers retired. But we continued to swoon over superstars like Gelsey Kirkland, Martine Van Hamel, and Julio Bocca at ABT; Darci Kistler and Kyra Nichols at NYCB. Sylvie Guillem, with her extreme technique, was ascending to a new level of celebrity in Europe. In the Soviet Union, one of the most supreme/serene/sexy ballerinas of all time, Altynai Asylmuratova, was with the Mariinsky and guesting with ABT.

Yes, Balanchine died in 1983, but Miami City Ballet was formed in 1985 with Edward Villella as director, and Helgi Tomasson took over San Francisco Ballet the same year. Francia Russell was setting Balanchine ballets on Pacific Northwest Ballet, as was Arthur Mitchell on Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Yes, Frederick Ashton died in the ’80s, but he hadn’t made anything of note for quite a while. His signature works date from much earlier: Cinderella in 1948, La Fille mal gardee in 1960, The Dream in 1964, Monotones in 1965, and Enigma Variations in 1968. For Tudor too, it had been a long time since he choreographed his most enduring works: Lilac Garden (1936), Pillar of Fire (1937), and The Leaves Are Fading (1975).

The ’80s was the decade that catapulted street dance onto the concert stage. Toni Basil brought Don Campbell’s Lockers and the Electric Bugaloos to The Kitchen, usually reserved for experimental dance and video. And Michael Jackson’s Thriller—hello!—was released in 1983. Everyone wanted to dance like MJ.

In 1985, tap dancer Gregory Hines hunkered down alongside of Baryshnikov in the blockbuster movie White Nights. Hines was a mentor to child prodigy Savion Glover, who, in 1989 starred in Black and Blue, a kind of precursor to Bring in da Noise Bring in da Funk.

I know that journalists like to make bold statements. But to claim that dance was dead in such a dynamic decade, even as an aside, undermines our understanding of how dance came to be what it is today. Whether one feels enlivened by any particular strain of dance is a personal matter. But dance as an art form is unstoppable. In many parts of the world, it continues to unfold in all its kaleidoscopic beauty and diversity.

14 people like this August 6, 2015 Wendy PerronFeatured Uncategorized 28

I used to say that Twyla Tharp’s 1976 Push Comes to Shove is the ballet that made Baryshnikov an American. Its slinky displacements, Vaudevillian showmanship, and casual sexiness, were all buoyed by Joseph Lamb’s ragtime music. It’s uncanny how completely Misha took to this quintessentially American idiom, slipping between classical pirouettes, the isolations of jazz, and the de-centering of postmodern. Nothing in his Vaganova training could have prepared him for this role, yet he intuitively understood every shift deep in his bones. (Check out a clip here.)

But I also think that Misha helped make ballet American—for our generation—in other ways too. As director of American Ballet Theatre from 1980 to ’89, he commissioned Tharp often and invited some of her dancers to be company members. He also commissioned David Gordon, Mark Morris and Karole Armitage. Tharp’s In the Upper Room, to transcendent music by Philip Glass, premiered with her own group in 1986 and entered ABT’s rep in 88. Her Bach Partita and Sinatra Suite also premiered at ABT during that decade. Together Misha and Twyla built an American repertoire for American Ballet Theatre. In case you need reminding of how glorious Upper Room is, here’s a clip.

Yes, Yes, Lucia Chase had brought in the first American ballets— Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, and Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free. (We were happily reminded of this at ABT’s 75th anniversary gala.) But there’s been a lot of Tudor, MacMillan, Fokine, and Ashton. I’m not saying I object, I’m just noticing that Misha’s reign embraced American dance artists. It’s a different time now, and I’ve enjoyed the full rep of ABT this season.

Of course another famous Russian had made ballet American for a previous generation. George Balanchine stretched the lines of ballet, sped up the allegro, and thrust his dancers into space. But Balanchine used mostly European and Russian composers, whereas Twyla went with Jelly Roll Morton, Randy Newman, and the Beach Boys.

Talking about the Beach Boys, Twyla’s Deuce Coupe (1973) was something of a precursor to Push in that it combined ballet steps with everyday gestures and social dance. In the original version she joined her own (post)modern dancers with the Joffrey company. (It’s interesting to note that Wayne McGregor’s latest work, which comes to the Park Avenue Armory in September, also mixes his own modern dancers of Random Dance with Paris Opera Ballet dancers.)

When Twyla made Push Comes to Shove for Baryshnikov, it had all the pyrotechnics he learned in his pure Russian training and his individual charm as a performer, but with a touch of insolence too. Think Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Adding a dollop of witty playfulness makes her ballets less brooding and more Dionysian.

What’s American too is the melting-pot finales in Tharp’s ballets like Push, Deuce Coupe, and Upper Room. She throws everything and everybody together in a wash of onstage anarchy, all repeating phrases they’ve done before but newly recycled because everyone’s onstage, all peacefully co-existing. In Push it was Vaudevillians and classicists, Russians and Americans. In Deuce Coupe it was ballet dancers and modern dancers, rock and classical. In Upper Room, it’s the stompers, the bookend girls, the pointe shoes girls and everyone else. These endings sometimes make me cry because they speak of active acceptance of all kinds of people—still a challenge in our American democracy. These big, unruly, energetic free-for-alls are Twyla’s vision of harmony…an onstage, perpetual-motion rainbow.

 

 

1 person likes this July 4, 2015 Wendy PerronFeatured Uncategorized 3

Dare I say it? From what I am noticing internationally, we are in the midst of a new wave of appreciation for older dancers. At the moment several superstars of dance are crashing the age barrier. But I think it goes beyond those extraordinary artists to dancers who are less well known. This post includes examples of both types, quotes from observers and practitioners, and Pat Catterson’s (somewhat humorous) list of roadblocks for those dancers trying to beat the odds.

First the Superstars

Alessandra Ferri, Wendy Whelan, and Carmen de Lavallade are each totally unique dancers, a world unto themselves, and that is part of the reason their artistry has endured.

As seen in Martha Clarke’s Cheri, the exquisitely dramatic Ferri, 52, can still transport us from rapturous joy to utter despair. (See Gia Kourlas’ cover story for Dance Magazine from last fall.)  And just last month, she performed at Covent Garden as the muse for Wayne McGregor in Woolf Works at The Royal Ballet. For me, as I posted in “Alessandra’s Ferri’s Knowing Body,”  the ballet completely relied on Ferri’s ability to create a passionate yet vulnerable protagonist.

At the Joyce in April, Wendy Whelan, 48, danced with all the fullness and thrust she always had in “Restless Creature.” And last weekend, in a Works & Process program at the Guggenheim, she showed a sassy theatricality in Arthur Pita’s Tango that I hadn’t seen before. (In case you aren’t familiar with her glorious dancing, what I wrote about her in my recent tribute to her at Danspace still holds true.)

Brian Schaefer, posting in OUT.com, wrote that Whelan’s age “allowed for greater possibilities in interpreting the relationships and interactions on stage. It also added something soothing and serene to each work—maybe we can call it wisdom.” He went on to say, “Especially in ballet, young love still reigns. But with Restless Creature, Whelan…steps beyond ballet’s suggested expiration date and demonstrates that lifelong curiosity and experience are as valuable artistic tools as pirouettes and penchée.”

The legendary Carmen de Lavallade,  at 83, knocked ’em dead at Jacob’s Pillow last year in her show As I Remember It. She also became an object of desire at Huffington Post. Brian Seibert of The New York Times called her dancing terrific. And Erin Bomboy of the Dance Enthusiast described her as “mesmerizing and silky.” NPR also jumped into the Let’s-discover-Carmen act with this segment on her.

Ageless in Europe

As it happens, venerable superstars of Europe are performing in Rome on June 24 and 25. In a presentation of Daniele Cipriani Entertainment http://www.dancemagazine.com/blogs/admin-admin/6468 the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek and his illustrious wife, Spanish-born Ana Laguna, will perform two of the most sparely poetic works I’ve ever seen: Memory and Potato. He is 70 and she is 60. The program, entitled “Quartet Gala,” also includes well known Tanztheater choreographer Susanne Linke, who turns 71 this month, and Bessie-award-winning Pina Bausch dancer, French-born Dominique Mercy, 65. For more info on the program, which has choreography by Ek, Linke, and Pascal Merighi, click here.

Postmodern Forever

Simone Forti at 80 still performs. Though she’s not quite as stable as before, her earthiness and wit are still accessible to her. In an online Fjord Review about Forti’s recent shared performance in Los Angeles, Victoria Looseleaf described her as “Monumental in her simplicity.”

Another historic figure who helped redefine dance in the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer, also 80, brought her premiere Dust to the Museum of Modern Art this month. Rainer supposedly doesn’t dance any longer—though she slipped in a quick chassé and a hovering relevé during the June 13th performance. In an advance story in The New York Times, Siobhan Burke quoted Rainer saying, “My preferred mode of self-presentation is ‘existence.’ I love to exist on stage. I no longer ‘dance.’ ” Later in the article Rainer claimed a right for the aging dancer to exist without judgment: “The aging body is a thing unto itself and need not be judged as inadequate or inferior if it can no longer jump through hoops.”

Choreographer Colin Connor cast two dancers over 50 for his work The Weather in a Room that premiered at CalArts last year. They were faculty members Stephan Koplowitz (dean of the School of Dance) and Heather Ehlers (of the School of Theater). He believes in age diversity onstage. Partly because, like Schaefer, he is interested in the relationships that older dancers can inhabit. “In our time,” he wrote in an email to me, “dance tends toward youth, to newness, and to the illustration of things youthful. Here I was drawn to the idea of a relationship that is not new but lived in, to a landscape of ongoing experience and the expressiveness of maturity, and to revealing a palpable physical intimacy between people of an age where this is less noticed or considered.”

Another choreographer interested in age diversity is Vicky Shick, who at 62 still dances in her own work. I happen to be on the receiving end of her largesse and have performed in two of her recent pieces. We’ve danced in each other’s work before so she knows my body and won’t overextend. In rehearsals, I loll around, slowly warming up my body, while she works with the other dancers until it’s my turn.

And just last week I participated in American Dance Guild’s tribute to Frances Alenikoff, who danced into her 80s. I am 67, and my dancing partners were Deborah Jowitt, 81, and Ze’eva Cohen, 75. On performance days, I would go through my daily exercises more thoroughly and add extra time for balancing on one leg. I widened the stance of some of the moves in an effort to be more stable. In performance, I sometimes had the thought, Whew, I got through that bit without keeling over!

Nothing New

Of course the interest in older performers is nothing new. Liz Lerman started using older people in her dances in the 1970s; the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, MD, carries on her tradition in some of its programs. Choreographers like Stephan Koplowitz and Risa Jaroslow have chosen to work with older performers. Naomi Goldberg’s currently active Dances for Variable Population gives performances and workshops throughout the summer. These kinds of explorations ask the question, Who gets to dance?

Almost twenty years ago Gus Solomons, along with Carmen de Lavallade and the late Dudley Williams, started Paradigm Dance Company, which challenged choreographers like Dwight Rhoden and Kate Weare to make work for these storied but limited performers. Valda Setterfield, 80, whose stage charisma grows with each decade, has danced with Paradigm as well as with her husband David Gordon.

Between This World and the Next

When I wrote about older dancers for The New York Times 15 years ago, I quoted Eiko Otake saying, “Because their bodies are not young, older performers carry something that is almost between this world and the next, that itself is artistic and transcending.’”

Now in her early 60s, Eiko has been illustrating that idea with her haunting current project, A Body in a Station.

About a year ago, I was fortunate to see butoh artist Ko Murobushi in Yokohama, who embodied a certain brute strength as a man in his late 50s.  But this work too, with it’s sudden falls and its offering of lilies, hinted at death.

Alternative Vision

To return to Rainer, she sees the acceptance of age as an “alternative vision.” Here’s an excerpt from an essay she wrote last year for Performance Art Journal (PAJ 106):

“The evolution of the aging body in dance fulfills the earliest aspirations of my 1960s peers and colleagues who tore down the palace gates of high culture to admit a rabble of alternative visions and options. Silence, noise, walking, running, detritus—all undermined prevailing standards of monumentality, beauty, grace, professionalism, and the heroic.”

PatCat’s Nine Lives, or, How to Dance Full Out at 69

But maybe older dancers are a new kind of heroic. Enter Pat Catterson, a dancer/choreographer/teacher who dances full out as a member of Rainer’s group—at 69 years old. (The other members are not far behind: they are all over 40.) She never stopped taking daily class. I asked her to tell me the hardest thing about keeping her body in dancing shape, and she came up with nine hardest things. The rest of this post is direct from Pat Catterson’s lips—or rather email.

1. It is difficult to walk the fine line between challenging my body and not overdoing. I can so easily inflame something if I do too much repetition or work past muscle fatigue or not give myself enough recuperation time. When to push and when not is hard to gauge. And the balance is always changing. What I could do two years ago in terms of endurance, I cannot do now.

2. Doctors are dismissive. Oh it is arthritis they say and treat me like I am some kind of crazy person who thinks she can still dance. I try to convince them that I take full class six days a week and am performing and intend to continue but most of them do not take me seriously. It infuriates me. But then I wonder if I am a fool. I find physical therapists more encouraging and helpful than doctors.

3. My brain does not work as quickly as it used to. One of my strengths was always that I picked up quickly. I got the steps fast and often led across the floor. It may not be noticeable to others but I do not pick up as fast now and I have to work at it. Sometimes just as we are to begin a combination, my mind goes blank and I cannot even remember how it starts. The brain does age.

4. I am ignored when I take class. I am used to it now. I am very self-disciplined but I could use a correction now and then, an outside eye. (An exception: Rachel List always gives me corrections.) It is really strange to feel so invisible. And it makes me a little angry, frankly. I am paying for the class like everyone else!

5.  I need to rent some ballon! I still could do convincing jumps one year ago but then it ended. I am in shape and I jump every day but I do not go up! I am strong. I stretch. I practice jumping. But the ballon disappeared! I still love leaps and jumping steps anyway even though I look quite unimpressive doing them.

6. My joints are stiff, particularly in my hips. It is very hard to get up and down from the floor. I can only do it in certain pathways.  I try to cover it up as best I can by the choices I make. The body just does not fold easily in the joints anymore. Grand plié is now not so grand. Annoying. I am so envious of the ease of the others as I struggle to do things that used to be so easy.

7. Dance clothes. Clingy does not look good on saggy skin! I am bony and I have muscle tone but the skin is saggy. I cannot wear the biketards or the skin-baring tops or leotards the others wear in the summer. I want to wear something sleek and contemporary looking but most regular dancewear just looks ridiculous on me. My age group is not the focus of dancewear companies.

8. In class, I used to love just barreling into everything but that is not possible now. I usually start a big or fast combination a little under in energy to pattern it first in my body so that I don’t strain myself. I can build up to a good energy but I have to start soft. I look at the young ’uns and I remember well that agility and energy. But I do take the full class. Use it or lose it as they say. I try to push past what feels completely comfortable, but just how much is a continual negotiation. Friends who are in their 40s or 50s think I am crazy to continue to take full class, especially Cunningham technique. One says that Cunningham is for young bodies and that I shouldn’t be putting my body through it. But it is my “home” technique and I love the physical and mental challenge of it.

9.  In the end I love to dance and perform as much as I always did. The adrenaline of performing still carries me beyond what I think I can do. I have a lot of energy, but I do not want to end up crippled or in a wheelchair. I have to be able to know when to stop demanding too much of my body. And only I will know because the doctors do not know.

 

5 people like this June 23, 2015 Wendy PerronFeatured Uncategorized 20

What does it mean that American Ballet Theatre has come out with a big new Sleeping Beauty? The production of Ratmansky’s new/old staging cost six million dollars (half of which is to be covered by the co-commissioning company, La Scala Ballet). I know I’m not supposed to think about money, just art. But while watching this production (twice), I couldn’t help but notice how extravagant it is—400 costumes and 210 wigs—compared to how little relevance the ballet holds for us today.

Tchaikovsky’s music is lushly beautiful. With its danceable waltzes and big dramatic bursts, it expresses the clash between anger and harmony that drives the narrative. But the tale is about an ancient kingdom that has only one worry: to make sure the daughter doesn’t get hold of a spindle. It’s not a ballet that stirs complex emotions or stimulates a train of thought about life’s dilemmas.

The other ABT classics are perennials because they each have something that speaks to us today. The violence between the warring factions of Romeo and Juliet is always painfully relevant. Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake is searching for something that’s more spiritual than his materialistic upbringing; and Odette, who feels trapped, has to rely on a man’s faithfulness. We learn from Giselle that class differences can forbid one from marrying for love, and that recognizing your mistakes can change your life.

And then there’s The Sleeping Beauty. Sure, it’s about the battle between good and evil, but what’s the message? Be careful not to incur the wrath of a powerful person? Of course no ballet can be reduced to a single message—but this one comes close.

I applaud Ratmansky for immersing himself in the Stepanov notation and drawings of Petipa’s original 1890 version. It’s interesting that he was guided more by his passion for ballet history than his personal choreographic desires. I also applaud the dancers, especially Diana Vishneva and Marcelo Gomes, who imbued the leading roles with a shared spirituality. (Similar, as I wrote in 2011 in Dance Magazine, to the partnership of Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg when they danced these roles in ABT’s last version.)

But at a time when people around the globe are plagued by violence, racial issues, and environmental degradation, a story that focuses solely on the aristocracy can only serve as an escape. But is there some undercurrent to this type of escape? Is it also some kind of reinforcement of complacency? The audience can get swept up in the glory of Tchaikovsky’s music and the detail of Petipa’s steps, as researched by Ratmansky and his wife Tatiana. But in the end the ballet represents a very privileged population.

One of my colleagues suggested taking pleasure in the precision and communicative aspects of the dancing. But I find the predictable structure of the choreography a deterrent. When I see the many repetitions in the Garland Waltz, I imagine Petipa saying to his dancers, “Do three of these and one of those.” In steps as well as story, The Sleeping Beauty doesn’t measure up to the other classics.

In her Dance Tabs review, Marina Harss writes, “The real challenge isn’t replicating the steps but bringing them to life, and through them, channeling the spirit of the age. In this, it seems to me that Ratmansky has succeeded, producing a ballet that glows from within.”

I agree that the dancing is stamped with the spirit of the times. ABT has given us a piece of history, and there is value in that. Ballet historians are soaking this moment up. But for some of us, it’s like seeing lithographs of dainty ballerinas come to life. In this Sleeping Beauty I missed dancing that extends into space; I missed the directness that Balanchine has given us. Dance evolves for a reason. It adjusts to how cultures and bodies change.

Maybe I’ll get used to this Sleeping Beauty as one flavor in the pack of ABT’s repertoire—the old world flavor. But if this reconstruction was intended to be the centerpiece of ABT’s 75 years, it seems a misstep to me.

I can’t help but point out that the previous, equally anticipated new Sleeping Beauty for ABT premiered only eight years ago. It was assembled by esteemed dance artists Gelsey Kirkland and Kevin McKenzie, along with Michael Chernov, none of whom is a choreographer. It kept some traditional things and changed or condensed others. It created some beautifully tender moments that propelled the story. (Again, I cite my posting from 2011.) To my mind its worst mistake was not giving the prince a physical struggle to reach his goal. He did not have to fight to arrive at the castle.

And the Ratmansky version makes the same mistake. It’s too easy for Prince Désiré to find the love of his dreams. If he had to overcome the barrier to the castle, if he had to work hard and sweat, if he had to shed his princeliness for a few minutes, the ballet would offer some sense of a catharsis. In the New York City Ballet’s version, the prince whacks away the choking vines that have encrusted the castle for a hundred years. By the time he reaches Aurora, we feel he has earned her love.

But Petipa/Ratmansky’s Prince Désiré has no such grit. He has technical grit, e.g. difficult petit allegro, but no emotional grit. He sails easily, guided by the Lilac Fairy, from his vision of Aurora to the bedroom of Aurora. All the royal characters retain their royal calm in every scene. This production seems to say that beauty and harmony only reside in a smoothly running aristocracy.

That said, I was delighted that Ratmansky reinstated the storybook characters that add such fun to Aurora’s Wedding. The White Cat and Puss-in-Boots are particularly welcome, with their witty clawing and flirting.

So….will there be another Sleeping Beauty in eight years?

 

1 person likes this June 15, 2015 Wendy PerronFeatured Uncategorized 15